Idea/Suggestion: Ability Glamours

I'm sure someone has suggested this before, but I think it would be a really cool idea to have a sort of glamour system for spells and abilities.

What I mean by this is, having the ability to change the look of some spells and abilities, while keeping the current effects and potency. I.E. swapping the appearance of Impact for Scatter on Red Mage, while still getting the upgraded damage.

Another option could be to swap out ability animations for old/removed animations, like the beloved Dark Knight damage combo, as an alternate set of animations for the current combo.

Of course, I don't know how intensive this would be on the devs end, and it's not something that would be viable in PVP, since clarity is paramount there. But I figure, if its possible to implement, it could be a great addition to the customization potential in the game, allowing players some more ways to differentiate their characters from one another.

Would be nice, for sure. I miss the earth and air spells on WHM. If I could have Aero animation over Dia, Stone IV over Glare, and Aero III over Holy, I'd be very happy. I feel like the new ability menu has this in mind to be honest. Perhaps they'll explore this after we hit a final level cap in the future.

Not just that, but also character animations as well. Not everyone wants to do the stupid Naruto run while playing NIN, you know? This is probably an old-engine sort of problem, though. Who knows, maybe the 7.0 facelift/rework will allow for more options like this?

There *are* ways of changing the way your abilities look and sound, it's just against TOS. But it's pretty damn cool. You can probably find a lot of examples on twitter or youtube if you want to see what people have come up with.

I think if implemented, it would have to be (and in any case I would prefer it to be) managed client-side, changing the appearance of the skill regardless of who is using it. Otherwise they would have to transmit a whole lot of data to other players about your skill appearance preferences, and that data – if feasible to be added at all – could be better dedicated to additional character appearance options.

Keep it client-side and you don't need to send anything at all.

I would love to be able turn down the overwhelming flashiness of attacks so I can go back to having party effects switched on in multiplayer content. It has just become unpleasant and blinding as every new iteration of a skill has to outdo the previous one.

Especially since the spells themselves don't change. We went from Banish/Glare to Banish/Glare III and it's just a whopping... 10 potency...?? The game's at the point where there is literally nothing to get excited about in class/expansion previews because they homogenized the game to such an absurd, excessive degree that none of the new buttons are going to be allowed to do interesting things. So the only thing that's left is the sounds and visuals, which *are* pretty great... but rather excessive when you've got 8 or god forbid 24 players doing them all at once.

This is pretty much the idea I had for 'how to make BLU get used more than 'first 48 hours after it's level cap gets raised': give base-form skills via the questline, as with any other job, and rework the 'learn skills spellbook' to be 'spell glamours'. There's nothing different between the fire cone aoe, the water cone aoe, the wind cone aoe, the unaspected cone aoe, when you use them outside of the Carnivale. So make their extra effects (element, petrify chance, instantkill chance, etc) be 'Carnivale Bonus Effect' that only takes effect when in the Carnivale, or unsynced (open world counts as unsynced). This way, you could do current endgame as BLU, it would be balanced so it can function at endgame, it retains the ability to be 'OP' (despite it being unbelievably not-OP compared to what they insisted it'd be), and because of LVL5 Death, it'd be a perfect solution for the constant issue people face of 'I need to get more Glam Dresser space, but I don't want to throw this item out cos reobtaining it from the raid it's from is a pain', they could just unsync it. Only one other game (to my knowledge) has BLU choose a 'loadout' from a massive list of spells. Every FF game I've played with BLU in had a list of 20-30 skills, and once the list's filled out, I could use em all, without choosing which one to leave out.

On the topic of non-BLU though, I was thinking it'd be cool if SE added a secret questline for each job (ie, not even marked with a quest icon over the NPC's head) without telling anyone, which leads to the job getting a second set of animations. a DRK that has Light themed skills, a GNB that has more elemental looking skills, a BLM that threw itself fully into the void side of things and has more 'dark' looking spells, etc. I saw a Blood themed WHM someone on YT had made, watching it made me forget about the state of healers for a few minutes. Ideally, I'd want it to be a reward for doing a VERY hard solo challenge, to prove your mastery of your class (Mage Tower cough), but the less skilled players would probably complain they're being gatekept out of content, rather than taking the more obvious solution of 'practice more'

Yeah, outside of ultimate, we're not really allowed to lock rewards away behind "skill gates." Not the way this game operates. We already see enough whining about having to PvP to get PvP rewards...

Interesting idea for BLU. Too bad they'll just continue to leave BLU in a corner gathering dust.

Whoops I just made a new thread requesting the same thing. I really hope they implement a system like this

One of the Bozja NPCs, Atori, is a lancer of sorts, but uses alternate dragoon animations that utilize more cherry blossom elements, more than just Chaos Thrust. A reskin of dragoon using those animations could be an online store item, as well as other similar "rethemed" versions of other jobs.